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Chuck Garnati
WILLIAMSON CO., Ill.—Four days after a big to-do was made over former Williamson County state’s attorney Chuck Garnati’s “retirement,” the Attorney Registry and Disciplinary Commission returned its decision…as we predicted.
On September 4, when Ang did the NewsCap, she noted that one of the reasons why we weren’t making a big deal out of Garnati’s “retirement” (resignation) from nearly 30 years in office as SA in Williamson was because it’d been done to death: We had covered Garnati’s faux pas in court since the first hint that there was an ARDC complaint…this while everyone else was still coddling him. We’ve never coddled; we’ve told the full story since it was available. In fact, we’ll tell you right now with the link directly to Garnati’s complaint, amended earlier this year, from the ARDC website, if you don’t want to believe US.
And here’s a screencap, in case you can’t get to the ARDC page for whatever reason.
Kevin Kakac
So on September 4, we told you why we weren’t following along with the rest of the media making much over Garnati’s years in office and the upcoming “retirement”….because we knew how it was gonna go. To quote Ang, “the ARDC is composed mostly of attorneys. They’re not fond of ravaging their own kind. They’ve probably already told Chuckles that if he resigns, and makes whatever production he wants of it, they’ll make sure he’s suspended for a nominal period of time, and he’ll be back at it. He told Becky Malkovich (we love Miz Malkovich) in the Southern today that he’s going into private practice. You watch. He’ll take a break, just like Kevin (Kakac) did (when he was disciplined by the ARDC, which was covered in full in print and before the e-Edition), then get right to that.”
And that’s just what’s happened. Chuckles is censured. According to avvo, and one of the attorneys on it, censure can be defined as “The lowest level of actual punishment for a violation of the legal ethics rules is private or public censure. This is basically a letter put in the attorney’s file and either available to the public (public censure) or not (private censure) that says that the attorney has been found to violate the ethics rules, but the offense is not serious enough to justify suspension of the license to practice law for a period of time.”
So the rest of what Ang said that night—“And what aggravates us is…we’ll never know. The ARDC will clam up, and that’ll be the end of it. And Chuck, like Kevin, will fade into obscurity. And what further aggravates us is that we’re the only ones who said ANY of this, about EITHER of them. And then mainstream people say we’re mean. What?? WHY? We’re telling you the facts. It never ceases to amaze us that people would rather have a prettied-up lie than the dirty truth.”—holds true. The ARDC waited for Garnati to make whatever announcements and excuses he was going to make, then they settled his case.
And it continues to amaze us that people would rather have a prettied-up lie than the dirty truth.
Marcus Marshall
You can bet that that censure decision was reached probably months ago. You can bet the ARDC conferred with Garnati over it. You can bet that they deferred to his version of “justice” in Williamson County, one of the most corrupt in downstate (which, it appears, is where Illinois and perhaps the entire country wants us to go) so they made a sacrificial lamb (how appropriate, since it’s Bob Butler’s town, the “hub of the universe”) out of Garnati since so many people raised so much hell over his racial remarks at Marshall’s trial and they wanted to present a semblance of “justice” going on downstate. But the ARDC doesn’t give a shit about things like this. This was just a ruse. IF the ARDC really cares about attorneys doing bad things, the Bradleys would already be looking for state appointments on the highway department or something. It’s ALL superficial…and while it gives us the opportunity to provide news for you, it’s symptomatic of a much, MUCH greater problem: The coverups and lies that government officials will tell in order to make everything appear normal and above board.
We saw how that came out for Kevin Kakac. He’s still under a civil suit in Franklin County that could destroy Peoples National Bank if investigated properly. Our advice to Mark Gilula, however: Move it out of Franklin. Move it out of the Second Circuit. Move it to something not even adjacent to the Second, if you’re going to prevail.
And our advice to the prospective clients of the newly-entered-into-private-practice Chuckles: Use caution. He may be an old guy in poor health, true. But do you want this kind of deception in your life? Probably not. So be aware.